Selfillumination a 3D animated short film in stereo 3D

Selfillumination – a 3d animated short film in stereo 3d.

About this 3d short film.

This is a 3D animated shortfilm of my character Selfillumination. It tells a short story on how you sometimes have to “change your head” to become really independent…

The keyframed character animation.

The first part I have completely hand animated with the Character Animation Toolkit. One of the challenging part was to animate an “invisible” cable. It was a process of animating the character – simulating the cable and see what comes out then tweaking the animation again – simulate and hope…

The 3d motion capture tap dance.

For the second part (the tap dance) I did get the incredible offer from Critical Moves USA to let them motion capture a custom sequence of my choice. Tap dancer provided by Denise Caston of MotorCityTapFest.com. Choreography and dancing by Jer Vernier. They did an incredible good job as this dance was really challenging. A big “Thank you” to Thad Johnson for making this possible!

The 3d animation tools.

This 3d short animation was 3d animated with 3ds max and rendered with mental ray. All visible content was modeled, animated and rendered by ak3d. For the intro I did setup and tune some more complex particle flows. With some scripting I did get the effects I aimed for. For the landscape I used Eon Vue xStream. All postproduction was made in After Effects twice, one post for the left eye one post for the right eye.

The render facts.

It was rendered in full HD stereo 3D with mental ray. Thanks to a very handy stereoCam modifier by Luis Marcoux, the stereo camera setup was easy. With all layers and with all stereo 3d frames it was about 24000 frames to render, while the average rendering time for one frame was about 30 minutes. The total project disc usage was around 500GB.

Please share it.

This is a complete non-commercial free art project. If you like this 3d animation, please share it.

The stereoscopic 3d version.

This animation is created in fullHD stereo 3D. The following animation is in fully stereoscopic 3D and can be viewed on 3D flat screens or on Nvidia 3D Vision systems. You can use your shutter glasses for watching it in stereo 3D and in full HD:

André Kutscherauer

Visualization Manager – Artist – Author

About

High-impact product renderings and animations, art direction, look development. 15 years experience in product design visualization rendering and animation. Motivated professional with strong conceptual approach, creative in solution finding and execution. Proven track record of building and managing multiple rendering and visualization teams. Published author of Car modeling with Rhinoceros.